How Master of None Unexpectedly Became TV’s Best Food Show

Alan Yang tells GQ how food turned into one of the show's most prominent characters, and how they managed to shoot in the world's top restaurant.

Alan Yang promises he is not an asshole. Yang, the co-creator of Master of None, is explaining in rich detail—through repeated assurances that he understands how lucky and privileged he is—which dishes he would want to eat for his last meal. It’s a tour of his own culinary highlights that would make Anthony Bourdain blush.

Yang would start, of course, with the grilled prawn from Extebarri in the Axtondo valley region of Spain, a restaurant where chef Victor Arguinzoniz cooks everything, even the desserts, on a grill. For his main, he would go with the omakase at Sushi Sowada in Tokyo, a six-seat, two-Michelin-starred restaurant staffed only by Chef Sawada and his wife. Yang’s final meal would not be complete without an al pastor burrito from Cactus in Los Angeles, only the burrito has to be ordered late at night and prepared extra crispy. And to finish things off, in lieu of dessert, Yang would ask his mom to prepare some fried rice.

The care Yang puts in to planning this make-believe meal is just one way he expresses his oversized passion for eating things. The most prominent way is through Master of None, the Aziz Ansari-starring Netflix hit in which you could argue food is the second-most important character. Nearly every episode features some notable New York hot spot, except for those episodes taking place in Italy, where Yang and Ansari shot in perhaps the greatest restaurant in the world.

GQ caught up with Yang to discuss how food became such a huge part of his show, how to eat like a Master of None, and much more.

GQ: Starting with season one, did you always know food was going to be such a huge part of the show? Or did it take on a life of its own?

Alan Yang: It came about completely organically. One of the reasons Aziz and I became friends is that we liked food. When we started working on Parks and Rec, we were living in LA, and we finally had jobs that could pay for us to go out to eat. We would meet chefs. Eric Wareheim and us became friends. We would go out all the time for Italian, or sushi, or whatever.

When we had a hiatus on Parks and Rec, we would take trips together. That all kind of was very organic. When we started this show, that’s what we did when we hung out. We go out to restaurants, and when we aren’t we talk about the next restaurant we want to go to.

We actually had to institute a rule in the writers’ room: only so many conversations in the show can be about food. It’s hard, because it’s a great fallback—it’s what we really talk about.

It felt like in Season Two, you guys pushed the food stuff even more to the forefront. Was that a natural extension of last season, or did you guys pick up on how people responded to the first season?

It was a natural extension, it was a combination of that and we lost willpower. [laughs] We didn’t push ourselves hard enough to stop talking about food. I get questions about people’s reactions to the show and if we changed things because people said this. I don’t know, we just didn’t really talk about that. It sounds simple—we just trust our instincts and do what we want to see. There was a whole debate about it. The character [Dev] really loves food, and he went to Italy and learned to make pasta. And his job is vaguely food-related. So there is naturally going to be a lot of talk about food, which suits us just fine. If you look at my Google Chrome browser, you’ll see that a lot of my bookmarks are food sites and food reviews.

How do you guys decide which restaurants to film at? What’s the process involved in finding a place you like?

We have a great locations department. A lot of it is written into the script. There was a funny thing last year. Really early on, before we had a writers’ room, we were writing the script for the episode that ended up being “Hot Ticket.” Dev goes on a date that’s really bad, then he runs into Rachel, they have a good time at a bar, and we wanted him to feel isolated at the end. There’s that shot where he leans in for a kiss and she says no, she walks away and you see the anguish on his face, and then we wrapped with her walking away. That scene ends with him isolated kind of in the middle of nowhere.

My gut feeling was, “Oh you know what would be great for that? Achilles Heel.” Because at one point I was in Brooklyn, and Achilles Heel is in Greenpoint, it’s not really close to a subway or anything really, and I was with my friends and they all walked away, and I remember feeling I was in the middle of nowhere. So I wrote that scene as Achilles Heel, not knowing anything about our production, I just liked that bar. But then it was so funny, we wrote all our scripts, we booked our stage, and our stage was a block away from the bar. So that’s something you write in your head is your ideal place to shoot, and then it’s incredibly convenient for production. There are two factors. When we write a scene, we usually have a place in mind, because we know a lot of restaurants we like in New York. We’ll write in the slug line, “INT. Carbone.” But we don’t always get to shoot there for a variety of reasons. Then we’ll get into logistics and scouting. We try our best to shoot at restaurants at our friends’ places and people we know.

I think the show has become really aspirational in way that people want to go to all the places they see Dev eating at. If someone wants to eat like you and Aziz do in real life, take me through that process.

I always just go by chefs. It’s chef-driven. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the great chefs around New York. You know if they’re opening up a new place it’s going to be good. It’s almost like directors of a movie. If Scorsese is putting out a new movie, it’s probably going to be good. So for the bigger places, they’re chefs that you trust. They’re the classic guys like Mario Batali and David Chang. Now the Major Food Group guys. Carbone is one, so that’s very basic. Those classics are good.

And then you have to do your research. I’m reading Eater, Grubstreet, Munchies—there’s tons of stuff to read. That’s how you find new places. That’s how I waste my time if I have a spare minute here or there. Don’t be afraid to try to new things.

The third thing is have friends who are as obsessed with food as you are, because they will bother you and they will text you about new places. You wouldn’t believe how many text threads I’m on where my friends are texting me about food. Between all those sources of information there’s a plethora of new places to go to.

And I guess the fourth thing is live in New York City, because to me it’s the best food city in the world. The sheer variety and volume of places you can go. And there’s new places popping up all the time. There are so many places I still need to go. I’ve scratched the surface in Flushing. I haven’t gone up past 120th. I haven’t gone deep into Brooklyn. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but man, there are an incredible number of options out there. Honestly, one of the reasons I moved here is because I was tired of eating in L.A. [laughs]

Early in Season Two, you filmed a scene at Massimo Bottura’s restaurant, Osteria Francescana, in Italy. Did you write that in just you could get a meal at a three-Michelin-star restaurant?

That was so crazy. That scene originally took place in an Airbnb. It was a very funny bit that we may use in the future so I won’t spoil it, but that scene was originally supposed to take place in an Airbnb, and it was that way until, I want to say, the day before the shoot.

Aziz had been living in Modena and he got to know Massimo and his wife Laura, so he knew them and Alessandro Legana, who works with Massimo at Francescana. So we did know them a little bit, but we never thought he would let us shut down what was then the number one restaurant in the world. We never even asked, we just assumed it would be impossible.

We had been shooting in the town for a while, and then we were talking to Ale, our friend, and he said something very humble but also like, “Massimo wants to know why you guys aren’t shooting at Francescana?” We were both like, “What?!”

So we scrambled. Massimo was very generous, and let us shoot in the private wine cellar. He gave us a one-hour window. Aziz, Aniz, and I got together and we wrote a whole new scene. And then we went in there and it was guerrilla style. Usually a scene like that takes half a day. We filmed it in an hour with a skeleton crew because we didn’t want to fill up the restaurant. I wasn’t sure if we got it. We didn’t plan on it, but it ended up being really fun.

Did you get to eat the food?

We had actually eaten there for dinner like a night or two before. [laughs] We didn’t know we were going to shoot there when we ate dinner there. So, implausibly, we got to eat there twice in three days.

Are the restaurants what people talk to you about the show the most?

I like to think that the show has an audience that isn’t just people like you and me, who live in urban areas and can afford to eat out all the time. But amongst those people a lot of them come up to me and ask about the restaurants. Or they’ll say something that really is a compliment to me, which is that the show felt like their life because we go to the places they actually go to. The last thing you want is a show that’s supposed to be New York City but it’s clearly Cleveland, Toronto or Atlanta. You can really tell when we go to The Four Horsemen or Carbone, these are real New York places.

If Alan Yang is taking someone on a first date, where is he going?

Oh man, there are so many options. And here’s the thing, I don’t have a go-to, because sometimes I want to try new places. [laughs] I have a list of places I want to go to. I don’t necessarily want to blow up my own spots, but I will say that in some of the episodes this year, Dev does go to places Aziz and I have been with friends or with dates. They go to Il Buco, I’ve definitely been there on a date before. I’ve gone to a date at Carbone before I’m sure. Those are all Italian places weirdly. It’s not like I only eat Italian.

I actually like to mix it up. Wouldn’t that be weird—”this guy comes in every Friday with a different person.” No, I don’t do that. Then the staff is just like, “Oh whoa!” You gotta mix it up.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.